Kansei: robot with facial expressions

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Kansei, from Meji University in Japan, is a robot face capable of 36 expressions that vary according to emotional interpretations of words it hears. When Kansei hears a word, it uses software to access a database of 500,000 keywords, create word associations and determine an emotion — ranging from happiness to sadness, anger and fear — which is expressed by a system of 19 actuators under its silicone skin. Sometimes the reaction is extremely expressive, as here with the word “bomb”, sometimes very subtle. (The question arises, would it have the same expression if it was given the sentence “the party was the bomb”?) Video after the jump shows its interesting reaction to the word “president”.